#Abundance

I follow this guy on Instagram who posts quotes the way I often do. He issued a challenge the other day to sum up my 2018 in one word. The first word that came to mind was blessed. I thought about sharing that word because it fits so perfectly and then I challenged myself to come up with another word. This all happened in a matter of seconds of course, but the next word that came to mind, was the one I used :

Abundance

From the moment I hit “done” on the keyboard of my phone, I’ve been dissecting why I chose that word. Again, blessed was the first word that came to mind and that was the more appropriate word, because I believe everything I am and everything in my life is thanks to a Heavenly Father that loves me and put things in motion billions of years ago that allows us to play a part in a story beyond the size and scope of our imaginations, for this one infinitesimal blip in time. I believe that the same Father uses all these blips in time we call “lifetimes” to bring light to the world. I believe He sent one very special Light into the world a couple of thousand years ago to better show us how that ought to be done, because, frankly, without a more explicit roadmap, we were really bungling the whole thing up.

I know not everyone reading this believes the way I do. I haven’t always been a believer myself. It wasn’t so very long ago, probably less than a decade ago, that I thought that people, like me, who believed what I just wrote about were….well not very bright. I thought and said they were naive. I thought and said they were simple and malleable, sheep-like in their wonder and submission. I now believe I was wrong. However, if you are reading this, and you still feel that way, I’m not going to try and convince you are wrong. That’s not my job. My job is to live my life in such a way that you have another blip of evidence that it might be true, and I try my best to do that. I screw it up on a minute to minute basis, but I try my best.

I can’t convince or convict you, but I can share with the hope of sparking your curiousity, so that is the intent of the rest of this posting, just a bit of sharing. When I first started trying this whole “faith” thing out, I thought it was going to be hard. If I’m honest, sometimes it is, but not really in the way I thought? You see the trick that this God guy pulls on you is a pretty clever one and that brings us back to the word I chose- Abundance. What I’ve learned since trying this whole thing on around attempting to live my life (imperfectly) in the way Jesus taught us to live, is that no matter how much I give, how much I serve and how much I do, I can’t out-give, out-serve and out-do God. The more I pour into my community, my family, my job; the more I lean into being who He created me to be- the more abundance I get?! It is the most remarkable thing I have ever seen! There are other people I know who feel the way I do and we, literally, sit around and talk about this sometimes, remarking to one another about just how strange it is?

I feel compelled to remind you that before I took a step on this path, I never would have believed any of this. I would have looked to some biobehavioral and/or anthropological self-fulfilling prophecy borne explanation of this. I’m sorry folks, I am still a skeptic, with a strong grasp of both psychology and selfish gene-driven motivations, but those explanations barely scratch the surface of what I’m talking about here. I wish I could describe it better, but I do finally understand how frustrating it is for people of faith to describe the mystery of their faith to others who don’t yet possess it. So, again, it is not my job to convince you, but it is my job to try and share. It is my job to be a blip that makes some noise about this in the hopes that the cumulative effect of my blip with other blips, over time, brings about a change. One might say I can try to be the change we want to see and be in the world to steal ironically and shamelessly from the secular positive affirmation universe (who may have stolen it themselves from the “be salt an light” crowd I hang with these days.)

As I write this it is Christmas Eve 2018 and we are about to celebrate the arrival of the Ultimate Example Blip that was sent into the world, for just one lifetime, to show us what Abundance and Blessing really means. If you follow Him, you get that it isn’t about things, you get that it isn’t about a zero-sum game of who can achieve more, give more, get more, do more. You get that it isn’t about feeling spiritual or magical or believing that the supernatural makes science and the natural world mute.

If you follow Him, you understand that it is about magnification and multiplication and clarity. It is about taking what is good and making it better, it is about taking all the “feels,” tastes, sights, sounds and smells in your life and making them more. It is about finding bounty everywhere you look and everywhere you go. It is about being confronted with wonder and awe, relishing that there are some things we can’t know. It is about people learning that they are not meant to live alone, or hurt or impoverished materially or spiritually. It is about the abundance found in living our respective blips of a lifetime as if these three things were as essential to living as the very breath in our lungs:

We Need God

We Need Each Other

The World Needs Us

I was blessed to find some people who taught me about this. They didn’t talk me into it. I didn’t read a book or pamphlet and then have an a-ha moment. I saw them living this life of abundance and I found myself oddly drawn to it. I took one step, then another, reluctantly making my way to the edge of the faith until I was over the other side and realized I believed. If I could give every one of you reading this (and those that aren’t reading this-as there are oh so many more of them 🙂 ) a Christmas gift it would be to spend one moment feeling the awe and wonder some of us feel when we are discussing this “abundance conundrum.” It would be the second best gift I could give you because only you can ask for the First Best Gift.

Only God can give you that First Best Gift, but all He wants is for you to ask. So I can’t give it to you but I can promise you this, if you ask, you’ll receive:

Abundance